Kuthambakkam Site Visit Report
Background on Rangasamy Elango
Rangasamy Elango was born in 1960 in the village of Kuthambakkam. The first in his family to complete his High School education and go to college, he overcame the many obstacles of his background as a lower class Dalit village youth to gain a Bachelor’s degree and work for the central government of India as a research scientist.
Although he moved away from his native village for college and for his job, Elango continued to come back to his village frequently. He realized that while the urban areas were moving forward and developing, his village was stagnating and in some ways even deteriorating. The problems - societal, economic, political - were numerous and complex. Elango slowly began some social activism, to help the villagers move away from communal practices, teach them ways to live more cleanly and healthily, and so on. His activism started to take up more and more of his time, and the Indian government began promoting the policy of Panchayat Raj. This was in the mid-1990s.
In 1995, Elango decided he should run for the office of panchayat President for Kuthambakkam because by then he had become very involved in the attempts to improve the villagers’ lives. He had also determined that while the problems faced by the villagers were complex and interrelated, the first thing he had to do was to eliminate the trade of illegal alcohol production and distribution. Elango won the election and became sarpanch with a mandate for reforms, and started on eliminating arrak (hooch, moonshine) from the Kuthambakkam panchayat.
Background on Kuthambakkam panchayat
The panchayat of Kuthambakkam comprises six villages (now seven, due to the recently built Samathuvapuram) and about a thousand families (six thousand people). Over fifty percent of the panchayat citizens are Dalits, and they are primarily Hindu. It is traditionally an agricultural community. Most of the farmland is owned by the higher castes; the Dalits have until recently only provided the farm labor, but now there are some Dalits who own farmland as well. The area is historically drought-free due to a very high water table (you can actually see the water seeping out of the ground in some areas because the ground surface is below the watershed), so there have not been any water-related issues.
Due to the producer-labor relationship between the demographic minority of the higher castes and the majority of the Dalits, Kuthambakkam has historically seen a significant discrepancy between the economic and educational achievements of the different castes. Even after caste-based preferences and reservations were introduced, the Dalits continued to suffer because of their starting point. The higher castes have also tended to (whether intentionally or unintentionally) keep the Dalits down by keeping them restricted to labor and not ownership of production, although this has changed somewhat in the last decade or two.
One example of this is the production of arrak (illegal alcohol). Until the past decade, this was a trade that was funded and controlled by the higher castes. Entrepreneurs who had access to capital would fund the still, the raw materials, and the distribution network. However, since they did not actually want to be associated with an illegal (and disreputable) enterprise, they would hire Dalits to run the whole show and just take a significant slice of the revenue. If the operation was discovered, the police would arrest only the Dalits (as they were the only ones actually doing the dirty work), the higher caste entrepreneur would bail the workers out of jail, then the whole business would start up again. The Dalits took all the risk and the non-Dalit got only the reward.
In the 1990s, this dynamic changed significantly as some of the better-off Dalits started funding their own arrak operations. They used the same model as before, but now the profits went to a Dalit instead of someone from a higher caste. To some in the Dalit community, this was a giant step forward. But they neglected the fact that the vast majority of the consumers (and, therefore, victims) of the arrak were also Dalits, so that the victory was morally empty.
When Elango came to power in 1996, he attacked the arrak problem vigorously. His timing, however, was poor since the Dalits had just begun to reap some benefit from the trade. According to people I talked to in the TNSF who had worked in and around Kuthambakkam, Elango has managed to alienate a majority of the Dalit population in his panchayat because he had no regard for the Dalit entrepreneurs’ requests to turn a blind eye to their practices. Instead, he went after one and all equally, and managed to virtually shut down production of arrak. Elango admits that he has never managed to fully shut it down because it is difficult to eliminate an industry that is so hidden and mobile, but claims that it is now only a trickle of what it used to be.
Reforms undertaken by Elango
When he attacked arrak, Elango realized that he would not be able to simply stop a thriving industry and then rest. Many of the Dalits working in the arrak trade had no other options for a livelihood, and even many of those consuming arrak were unemployed or barely subsisting. Elango recognized that what the villagers needed was something to do, honest work with honest wages that would allow them to subsist and also resist the temptations of arrak.
Initially, Elango’s interest was just to give the villagers a quick fix, to show them that they didn’t have to depend on arrak and that work could be found in their village. To do this, he worked closely with some contacts he had in the Tamil Nadu state government to get funding for some infrastructure projects within the panchayat. The government finally granted Kuthambakkam money to pave the state road that runs through the village. In a normal village, the sarpanch would have used such funds to contract an outside company to come and do the work with machines and outside labor.
Elango, who was studying JC Kumarappa’s Gram Swaraj theory of economics, decided that he would use the funds to employ his own villagers. By doing this, he gave many of the newly unemployed arrak laborers some work and steady income for a fixed period while still getting the work done at the same quality that the company would have done. Moreover, he saved enough funds to also build a covered sewage drain along the roadside that greatly improved the hygienic conditions of the area. The villagers are proud of this road and the drains and manage to keep both of them functioning and clean as a point of pride.
Another project in which Elango partnered with the Tamil Nadu state government was the construction of a village, called a Samathuvopuram. This was based on an initiative of the Tamil Nadu government to build new villages all over the state that would serve as models of communal harmony. A total of 151 panchayats were given the funds to build small villages of 100 homes, which would be constructed and laid out in a way that would encourage people of various castes and religions to live together and interact peacefully. Kuthambakkam was selected as one such site and is one of the few that is still fulfilling its function five years down the line.
The reasons for this are simple. First, Elango once again chose to follow the Gram Swaraj ideology and build the new village using existing village labor and techniques (mud bricks, rather than concrete). This provided significant employment to the villagers and gave them an accomplishment to be proud of. It also saved money on raw materials and is in fact better suited for the conditions; the saved money was used to build slightly bigger homes with a proper outhouse that also serves as a compost source if the occupants so desire. Second, the villagers chosen to live in the Samathuvopuram were those who clearly demonstrated need for proper shelter, agreed to work on building the homes, and also professed communal tolerance. Third, and perhaps most important, the Kuthumbakkam panchayat actively manages the Samathuvopuram to ensure that short-term problems are resolved and do not become long-term problems.
In going around the Samathuvopuram, it was clear that while the village was new and therefore better than other villages with similar demographics, Kuthumbakkam had actually tried to live up to the spirit rather than just the law. Some of the money saved on construction costs also went to building a balwadi for the children of the village and the construction of a community center which rivals similar centers in urban areas. Elango’s hope is that this community center can serve multiple purposes, including that of a gathering place for the villagers, workshops for local entrepreneurs and artisans, dormitory for visitors, and even a place that can be rented out for visiting groups. While I was visiting, there was a group of anti-globalization activists who were staying at this center and practicing some kalaa jaathaas that they were going to be presenting at various villages in Tamil Nadu.
The villagers of the Samathuvopuram are not a monolithically ideal group of people, but they demonstrate the promise of such construction and development. The people interact with each other, keep their places clean (with some monitoring and chiding from Elango), and some have even done a really amazing job of decorating and beautifying their small plots with assorted rocks and plants and such as can be found lying around the village. The key, it seems to me, is active management to get people thinking differently, to feel like they own something and therefore should be proud to keep it nice and livable. The same is true for the communal harmony efforts; apparently, there are still quarrels among people due to differences in caste and community. Elango and his panchayat seem to be actively involved with the people, and the villagers seem to trust them and bring them the problems before they explode into anything unmanageable.
By constructing and actively managing the Samathuvopuram, Elango and his panchayat have effected a small but important social change. They’ve also provided the basis for an economic change, since the people who live in a Samathuvopuram house now have the ability to save some money (since most of them have already paid for their houses with labor). There is still much to be done to improve the village society and economy, but Elango’s efforts are certainly having an impact.
Although he has successfully worked with the government for the efforts described so far, Elango believes that a successful model village will be a self-sufficient one. Kumarappa’s economics states that the villages, which contain 75% of India’s population even today, are the true engines of Indian economic development because of the consumption generated by them. To validate this and to plan for his next step in creating a model village out of Kuthambakkam, Elango did economic surveys of his panchayat and some of the neighboring panchayats as well. He and some others went door to door, speaking with each householder to determine how much they spent on each of fifteen basic products. These included food items, hygiene items, tobacco, and alcohol. Because Elango and his assistants were all known to the people to whom they spoke, there was a greater degree of candor in the answers.
The survey results were stunning. A panchayat of 5,000, such as Kuthambakkam, was spending Rs. 700,000 a month just on rice alone! Elango and his team analyzed all these surveys and found that a significant majority of the money spent was on items that were either grown or made from things that were grown locally. In fact, the village as a whole typically lost twice in the deal, because they sold raw materials to some company or businessman at wholesale, then turned around and bought some finished product at retail. Elango recognized that in order to help the villagers maximize their buying potential while at the same time providing them the level of employment they needed, he would have to initiate a change in the economic setup.
Ongoing projects
Of the several ongoing projects in Kuthambakkam, the only one that is not directly derived from Elango’s efforts at creating a Gram Swaraj model village is the creation of a Samathuvapuram. The idea of a Samathuvapuram, based on a mandate from the Tamil Nadu state government, is to create a hamlet within each of 150 villages that would be a model of communal harmony. The government provided the same funds to each of the 150 villages to build houses for a selected group of people from different castes, religions, and classes to live amongst each other. Of the 150 attempts, the Kuthambakkam is one of the most successful and enduring (after three years) because Elango ensured that the principles of democracy and Gram Swaraj were applied to the implementation of the hamlet. One hundred families were chosen because of their need and willingness to cooperate with each other and with the panchayat. Of the hundred families, only one has been asked to leave the project. After the families were selected, Elango asked each to contribute labor to construct the houses of the hamlet. Almost all the other Samathuvapurams were constructed by outside contractors; by using villagers’ labor, Elango ensured a sense of ownership and also saved on construction costs, which allowed Kuthambakkam to have a considerably better-built and more functional Samathuvapuram. They even managed to build a balwadi and community center with the savings.
The Gram Swaraj project undertaken by Elango and his village has two parts: the model village and the Panchayat Academy. The model village is the outcome of the economic survey described in the previous section. After conducting the household survey across all of Kuthambakkam, Elango and his panchayat decided that they had a golden opportunity to test and prove Kumarappa’s theory of village-level economic self-sufficiency. They recognized that if they produced just some of the consumables themselves, within the village, using raw materials produced by the village and labor from the villagers, they could not only increase the amount of money that stayed in the villagers’ hands, they could also significantly reduce the problems of unemployment that have plagued Kuthambakkam. In January 2003, Elango expects to start a small-scale effort to produce detergent soap, bread, processed toor daal, processed rice, and processed groundnuts (resulting in oil, fuel, and cattle feed). Over a few months, after the villagers become familiar with the production methods, the scale of the production will be increased to meet the demands of the entire village. The expected timeframe for evaluating the success of this project is two years.
Of course, no village can be completely self-sufficient, and having one village that is mostly self-sufficient in a nation of hundreds of thousands of villages is not very impressive. To spread his methods and Kumarappa’s economic ideas, Elango has also planned a second project, called the Panchayat Academy. This would be a regular workshop held in Kuthambakkam that would bring village leaders from all over India to learn about how to revitalize their village economies. As more and more village leaders learn about Gram Swaraj and implement these ideas in their villages, the idea is that the movement will gain momentum and revolutionize the way villages are integrated in the national economy. Since most panchayats and panchayat presidents do not have the educational background that Elango has, his goal is to first communicate the principles of Gram Swaraj using common sense and practical techniques. Once the economic ideas have taken root, he will demonstrate the various production innovations he has made and help the other village leaders come up with ways to address their unique problems. The Panchayat Academy has already drawn interest from village leaders in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and even Madhya Pradesh. Elango is waiting to secure the funds necessary to construct an appropriate building to house the visiting leaders and also serve as a classroom for the workshops. The hope is that the Academy will be established quickly so that the momentum of the Model Village project can carry over to this project.
Financial investment and expected result
All of the projects in Kuthambakkam have been implemented with funds from the state government, funds and support from domestic NGOs, and even support from international organizations. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a specific number for the total amount spent on the various projects in the time I was in the village and the Gram Swaraj projects were still in the process of securing funding and hadn’t been fully implemented. The impression I got from talking to the villagers and Elango himself was that whatever money was received was stretched out as much as possible by using village labor and village raw materials (even the houses that were built were done so with local “mud brick” techniques that actually are more sturdy than the concrete used by big construction companies). Also, the projects haven’t received significant funding from organizations such as A.I.D. yet, and so have not been monitored as closely by outside organizations. The Ashoka Fellowship that Elango was granted in 2002 is an indication that the Kuthambakkam projects are not wasteful or unreasonable.